markets and morality

Not only has the dominance of the market had a corrosive effect on the social landscape. It has also eroded our moral vocabulary, arguably our most important resource in thinking about the future.[…] In the public domain, the two terms that dominate contemporary discourse are autonomy and rights, which share the mentality of the market by emphasizing choice while ruling out the possibility that there might be objective grounds for making one choice rather than another. This has made it very difficult for us to deliberate collectively about some of the most fateful choices, environmental, political, and economic, humanity has ever faced.

Chief Rabbi of Britain Jonathan Sacks, in The Dignity of Difference, p. 32.

(Just how pervasive is the market mentality may be seen in how seamlessly Rabbi Sacks praises “the spread of birth control techniques” as an unqualified good which will “remove the danger of overpopulation” only eight pages previous.)